The 71st Cannes International Film Festival wrapped up earlier this afternoon, with a closing ceremony that saw Spike Lee take home the festival’s Grand Prix (a.k.a. “second place”), while Japanese family drama Shoplifters snagged the coveted Palme d’Or.

Apologies to anyone hoping for a first impression on the closing night film of Cannes, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. It’s premiering right now, as I type this, but I’m on a flight to New York instead, ready to return to real life after 11 days in the bubble. I’ve missed or am missing a few other…

You’d be forgiven for losing track of every detail of the topography of America’s long, bumpy road from November 2016 to the present day, a shitty road trip where every whispered city name provokes an impromptu game of “School Shooting, White Supremacist Rally, or Poisoned Water Supply?” Still, “Charlottesville” is…

BlacKkKlansman (Grade: B), Spike Lee’s first entry in the Cannes competition lineup since 1991’s Jungle Fever, never outright mentions that it takes place in 1979. We can ballpark the year through context clues, like the ostentatiously dated fashion choices and the opportunity Lee takes to play around with the imagery…

The first trailer for Spike Lee and Jordan Peele’s BlacKkKlansman, the Dave Chappelle sketch that turned out to be a true story that’s now a major feature film, has arrived. Denzel’s son John David Washington stars as Ron Stallworth, a black cop who was able to infiltrate the Klu Klux Klan in 1970s Colorado with the…

Cannes, the world’s most prestigious film festival, announced its selections earlier today, including the Official Competition (which competes for the top prize, the Palme d’Or), the Un Certain Regard undercard, and a handful of special, midnight, and out-of-competition screenings.

Welcome back to Trailer Happy Hour, where we collect the day’s teasers, trailers, promo spots, and general pop culture marketing detritus, and boil them all down to one simple, easy-to-digest digest. Today, we have on-tap a murderous Margot Robbie, a priest on the edge, a former spy getting farted on, and a…

Everyone seems to be enjoying Brighton Netflix, but the streaming service can’t survive on just bad fantasy cop movies. To that end, Deadline is reporting that Netflix has renewed Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It for a second season. Lee actually announced the news himself with an Instagram video, sounding genuinely…

She’s Gotta Have It is good. If you look at Spike Lee’s career, it’s easy to fault him for his missteps: He has difficulties portraying characters outside of his male experience, his range is often harmed when his ideas get too expansive or the material is too different from his own life. All of these issues caused…

Jordan Peele delivered clever and potent insight on race relations with Get Out—not to mention made a stellar horror-comedy—and now he’s poised to do it again alongside none other than Spike Lee. Variety reports that the two directors are teaming up to make Black Klansman, a crime thriller about the Ku Klux Klan. John…

Netflix’s has released the first look at its new Spike Lee joint: A series based on the director’s early feature, She’s Gotta Have It. Like the film, the teaser is primarily in black and white, save for its final image, which features the protagonist—artist Nola Darling (DeWanda Wise)—sitting up in a bed. When the…

“What more is there to say?” It’s a question that plagues any attempt to wade back into yesterday’s headlines—the stories that have been covered so exhaustively, so round-the-clock extensively, that their every sordid detail is now burned into the public imagination. Indeed, without new information, what more can be…

Variety reports that Netflix will be broadcasting Rodney King, the latest project from director and producer Spike Lee. Written and performed by Lee’s long-time collaborator Roger Guenveur Smith—a noted stage actor whose credits include Lee’s Do The Right Thing—the one-man show tells the story of the Los Angeles cab…

The George W. Bush years were dark, no matter which side of the aisle you sat on. Less than a year into his first term came the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and everything thereafter was haunted by the specter of war—first in Afghanistan and then, erroneously, in Iraq. The U.S. government engaged in torture…

Singer-songwriter Chrisette Michele has taken some flak for her decision to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration tomorrow despite calls to boycott it. (Apparently, the boycott has something to do with him filling his cabinet with white supremacists and painting black culture as dangerous and ugly at every available…

Variety is reporting that Bill Nunn—who played Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s pivotal 1989 drama Do The Right Thing, and editor Robbie Robertson in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies—has died. A celebrated actor of television, stage, and screen, with more than 70 credits to his name, Nunn was 62.

After dipping his toe into the waters of Amazon for his 2015 film Chi-Raq, Spike Lee is now going to give another streaming service a try with a TV remake of his breakout feature She’s Gotta Have It. According to Deadline, Netflix has ordered 10 episodes of a She’s Gotta Have It series, with Lee set to direct all of…

Powell’s Barbershop has been dubbed the “heart” of Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood: Not only has the shop been a mainstay for haircuts and friendly gatherings, but owner Sunni Powell has also organized career fairs and speaker series in an effort to help residents combat the gun violence in the area as well as…

With the benefit of hindsight, 1991 was a watershed year for rock music. That was the year of Pearl Jam’s Ten and Nirvana’s Nevermind. A documentary released in 1992 even referred to it as The Year Punk Broke. The alternative revolution was just entering its golden age, as evidenced by the popularity of the inaugural…